The article insists several times this is not due to genetics, because people with lower IQ don't have more children. This is not true[0]. What the article may want to say is that it's not due exclusively to genetics.
Given fertility is negatively correlated with intelligence, and how hereditary IQ is, it's just a matter of time until IQ declines.
This is not so shocking, how many kids does your typical college professor have before 35, is it 0 or 1?
You hint at this, but it's worth saying it explicitly--folks with lower IQ could out-produce folks with high IQ even without having more kids per-person, as long as they're reproducing at a younger age. If, say, lower IQ people were to have kids at an average age of 23, and higher people have kids at an average age of 33, the lower IQ folks would have twice as many kids over a ~100 year span and 4x as many over ~150 years!
The article acknowledges this, and says that the major findings is:
- IQ is not as strongly correlated to parents as believed
- IQ is not negatively correlated with fertility
When an article says "we've found evidence against current accepted knowledge" it is not a counter argument to say "Current accepted knowledge says otherwise, therefore you are wrong!"
But we do need better access to the numbers behind both sides in order to participate in the discussion.
You gain static intelligence (what you’ve learned) using fluid intelligence (IQ). But learning new things quickly relies on a large body of knowledge to draw from.
Lots of poor people denigrate education. “Street Smart” is considered the only useful knowledge. Lots of these parents literally don’t care if their kids fail out of school (after all, they did too and are “just fine”). These kids never build up that critical knowledge early which nullifies their IQ for life.
Bad diet, abuse, crime, high stress, being raised by a single mother, etc also affect IQ. All these things are pervasive in most poor neighborhoods.
Parents don’t affect initial intelligence as much, but they certainly affect whether that intelligence is squandered.
I agree you're technically right, however I think the article does everything possible to obscure this fact, see some quotes:
> The research suggests that genes aren’t what’s driving the decline in IQ scores, according to the study, published Monday.
> The causes in IQ increases over time and now the decline is due to environmental factors
> It’s not that dumb people are having more kids than smart people, to put it crudely. It’s something to do with the environment, because we’re seeing the same differences within families
But I agree we need numbers, which was the most important thing the article could've provided.
It also begs the question, who’s really more intelligent? The person who spent their prime years pontificating, or the person who won the evolution game?
The person who won the evolution game only has a more adept ability and grasping, retaining, and applying concepts, especially at high levels. I remember people at University who so easily managed to apprehend abstract concepts while I would struggle for hours. They weren't necessarily more or less intelligent, but they were wired differently and could clearly operate at a higher level.
> It also begs the question, who’s really more intelligent? The person who spent their prime years pontification, or the person who won the evolution game?
You're right, who's smarter? The people who manage to reproduce thus pass on their genes or the ones that are "too smart" not to?
You could say they're winning, but they are essentially abusing the good-will of society by imposing the care of their offspring onto society instead of caring for them themselves. It may sound bad, but in my mind, purposefully bringing children into the world without security to care for them seems immensely evil and selfish.
Given fertility is negatively correlated with intelligence, and how hereditary IQ is, it's just a matter of time until IQ declines.
This is not so shocking, how many kids does your typical college professor have before 35, is it 0 or 1?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence